USA

DavAlpaugh@aol.com 

In Praise Of Upward Mobility

We had ducks in our pool this morning.

Mallards, a drake and his hen. They came

skittering in to what must have seemed to them

a strange body of water and swam around

quacking their approval; tried like good sports

to acquire a taste for chlorine and algaecide;

then hopped ashore and waddled about the patio,

searching for slugs and asking savvy questions:

A good place to shit? To lay eggs?


Just another upwardly mobile couple,

checking out real estate on a warm spring day;

looking for a safe, drug-free environment—

a family neighborhood with good schools

and not too many snapping turtles,

where they just might have that one chance in hell

to bring up their children in the old duck way.


They flew onto the deck to sun themselves

and were impressed by our view of Mount Diablo.

Nice couple, though their can-we-really-afford-it-dear

giggles made them sound a little sillier than they were.

Feeling at home they ambled back to the pool

where they dove right in and frolicked like honeymooners.


I've always been a sucker for reason. So my

impulse was to wise Candide & Cunegonde up—

to open the window and shout: "Don't buy here!

The schools are full of drugs! All people care about

are golf, pizza, television!"


But knowing how badly a pair of nesting

mallards can foul a swimming pool

I ran outside banging a cookie sheet.


At first they stared at me in disbelief—

much as my wife and I stared at the man at the mall

who appeared out of nowhere shouting obscenities.

But when they saw how I meant to be O! O! O!

so much ruder than your average asshole ‹

being upwardly mobile, they rose into the air

and, casting one last longing lingering look behind

at a dream they had almost bought into,

beat their way back to their one-bedroom apartment:

26-D, at the duck pond, next to Lucky's supermarket.

On The Raritan, 1959

On the first Saturday in April trout season began.

Half of northern New Jersey converged on the Raritan.

We stood in hip boots, shivering, in cold, muddy water,

some casting flies, others worms or hellgrammites,

trying not to snag the line of that fellow sportsman

who stood just a few dozen feet downstream.

One morning we heard cheering on the other side of the trestle.

Workers from the state fishery at Hackettstown

were stocking the north branch of the Raritan—

flinging shimmering jumbo trout at jubilant fishermen:

hatchery-fed rainbows, so starved for insects and worms,

they began striking the moment they hit the water.

We too cheered when the hatchery barge came into view

and then some really fine trout fishing began.

In less than an hour everyone took the legal limit.

I wrapped six keepers in the Newark Star Ledger

then joined the convoy heading east on Route 22.

This, I said to myself, is the only way to fish for trout

in New Jersey. That was before I had my first marketing

class and began to question channels of distribution:

Why for instance did the state waste everyone's time

throwing the people's trout into the water

when it would have been more elegant

to drop them right into our creels,

eliminating the middleman,

the river.

© All Copyright, 2000, David Alpaugh.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.